Vaccine Advantages And Disadvantages

781 Words4 Pages
Vaccination is the process of presenting to the immune system-particularly the adaptive-an agent that has the same components as the disease to be prevented, treated or improved. The sole aim of vaccination to any disease is to stimulate the immune system as the pathogen would and create a form of ‘memory’ in the case of later exposure to that specific disease. This memory will make the immune system ‘recall’ the initial exposure and also recruit specific immune components to wade it off faster. [1][2] So many infectious diseases have been eradicated totally or ameliorated owing to the success of vaccination e.g. small pox, polio, whooping cough, measles etc. vaccination has indeed made the world better disease-wise. [3] Of all the wonders…show more content…
It mainly induces the cellular response. ADVANTAGE; it induces strong, often lifelong immunity, LIMITATION: it can revert to virulent state and it is contraindicated in pregnancy and immune deficiency e.g. measles.[7]1 There are also other kind of vaccines such as DNA vaccine, which uses a genetically engineered virus or bacteria to introduce an antigen into the body, also use of soluble proteins and toxoids.Of all different kinds of vaccination, none of these have been able to prove efficient against HIV /AIDS, a HIV vaccine if produced, should be able to protect uninfected people from getting infected and also stop HIV in infected people from progressing and further cut the transmission chain. To access the reasons for the lack of a vaccine for the HIV virus let’s first look at this virus’ structure. Unlike the human genome, the HIV virus is a retrovirus, has a double stranded ribonucleic acid [dsRNA] and three structural genes- the envelope proteins: gp 120 and gp41, the capsid protein :gag [p24] and pol : aspartate protease, integrase and the reverse transcriptase. Reverse transcriptase synthesizes dsDNA, dsDNA integrates into host genome. The virus binds to CD4+ receptors on T cells and starts replicating. Its epitopes are highly variable.
Open Document